I Can See a Work Surface

How about that?  I've made some progress on cleaning up and reorganizing my craft room.  I've tackled and tamed the work table so that now I can actually see a work surface.  A nice clean expanse of table always makes me want to sit down and do some scrapbooking or other crafting.

This is what the work table looks like standing back from it.  I got rid of some extra stuff that was cluttering up the shelves at the back and repositioned some of the boxes that hold my different matting papers for scrapbooking. Then, of course, I labeled all of the boxes so that I can see at a glance what each box contains.  I moved the phone off of the makeshift stand (which was a leftover organ bench half-jutting out from under my table) and put it on top of one of the blue mini-drawer units to the side of my table.  I have an extra-long cord on the phone so I can move it down onto the table surface if I need to or bring it over to the computer desk, if I want to talk and compute at the same time.

I also tackled the closet in the craft room.  I decided not to use pegboard.  The Commander doesn't like to nail any more things into the wall than he has to so, for now, I'll see if we can make do without it.  Instead of putting my bobbins on pegboard, I found some wicker baskets and have separated the bobbins according to which spinning wheel they go with and put them in the baskets.  I put those baskets on some of the open shelving on the other side of the room.  I'll show you that side as I get it better organized.  I also cleaned out the top of the closet a bit and relabeled the containers on the top so I know what is where.  I cleaned off the top of the white shelving units.  I found a cute Easter bucket and am using that to store my larger straight needles, with my interchangeable needle sets stored behind the bucket.  My circulars are hanging to the right, out of the picture.  I sorted through the drawers and put like things together and then labeled all the drawers.

Finally, I took a bit of a break this morning to work on the Kathleen T. Carty square in the Great American Aran Afghan book.  It's always a mystery to me how some of these squares are going to actually come together.  When I got to our afghan class last evening, we were tackling picking up the stitches around the inside of the outer edge in preparation for knitting the center of the square.

First, I hadn't knit with DPNs in a long time.  I've been using circular needles and the Magic Loop method for quite a while now and have really gotten spoiled.  I felt like I was all thumbs.  Then, after we picked up all those stitches, the next thing the designer has us do is bind them all off.  Say what?  I asked our instructor twice, just to make sure I was hearing her correctly AND understanding what the pattern seemed to be telling us to do.  It just didn't seem to make any sense.  However, I'm finding that if you just take it on faith and follow the patterns in this book step by step, somehow they mostly DO come together and look like the pictures.  For those occasions when I just can't seem to figure out what in the world the designers are trying to tell me, that's when I'm extremely glad that I'm taking a class with other knitters and tackling this afghan in a group.  It's nice to have an instructor that can give us little "heads-up" tips for those "landmines" that seem to abound in some of these squares.

And I am so loving the fact that we are basically knitting up one square a month.  I'm not feeling rushed and I can really take my time as I continue to master some skills that I normally would not have had the confidence to try on my own.  Plus, I really like meeting with the same group of ladies each month.  They are like a support group and a cheering squad all rolled into one.  Even though I've knitted for over 50 years, I've never been a very adventurous knitter so I've tended to stick with types of knitting that I knew I could easily do.  This afghan has really forced me to stretch outside of my comfort zone.  That's been a good thing.  And I'm so delighted to report that I'm feeling VERY comfortable with knitting cables now.  In fact, I'm enjoying knitting them.  Who would have 'thunk' it, as my mom would say?